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Civic Museums Institution - Museum of the Risorgimento of Bologna dedicated to the Certosa two
mesmerizing evenings, at the beginning and at the end of summer 2011,
that included a physical and sensorial “journey” through its most
evocative spots where video and music mixed and alternated with poems
of great poets like Keats, Borges, Goll as well as to dance
performances dedicated to the great mystic Rumi.

«The
Certosa (charterhouse) - the historical cemetery of Bologna -, aside
being the most beautiful cemetery in the world, is the most
characterized and at the same time the less provincial place in the
city, so much so that in past centuries it was included in the grand
tour, and C. J. H. Dickens himself has left an admired and amused
description.
The neoclassical rigor somehow protects
this place from the pathetic excesses of the fin de siècle
and early twentieth century art, so intensely present in other even
more monumental cemeteries such as Staglieno (Genoa).
Time’s intense work of remodelling -
Time, the great sculptor of Yourcenar- has trasformed it into a
mirable romantic sediment grafted into a classical structure which
makes us think of C.D. Frierich’s sublime painting.
An enthralling space where a poignant
and sacral melancholy floods every urn, each profile, each gesture as
a symbolic western ganges, where the marble angels gently plunge,
making this place wonderfully unique, a lyrical antidote to the
global urbanistic culture of present days».

The restoration of the “Monument to the Martyrs of Independence” has just been completed: it features a grand lion, sculpted by the Bolognese Carlo Monari (1831-1918) and it is spectacularly located at the end of the Sala delle Tombe (the Graves Room) at the Certosa cemetery.